Escorts in Oxford Circus, W1B: who is close, and how soon
A quarter to six on a weekday, and the crowd climbing out of the station meets four curved stone corners so alike that they might have been cut from one drawing, which is more or less what happened. Nobody on the crossing sees a circle, only those quadrants, yet each of them sits on a longer story: a Roman line running west, a royal street pushed north through open fields, three railways dug underneath in the space of seventy years. Oxford Circus escorts are booked into W1B, a postcode whose plan is older than any building standing in it, and most of that history can still be read from the pavement by anyone who looks up past the shop signs.
On the ground
Oxford Circus in practice
Landmarks on the arrival slip
By postcode, never by nameW1B 1JA, W1B 2QS, W1B 4DY, W1T 3NP, W1F 7HL, W1T 3NG.
Nearest stations
Walking timeOxford Circus, 1 minute. Bond Street, 4 minutes. Piccadilly Circus, 8 minutes.
Getting there
W1BTravel is included across Zones 1 and 2, and counted from the moment the hour is set rather than from when she leaves.
On the board
Nearest prints to Oxford Circus
Who works here
On the board in Oxford Circus
The eight prints above are a first shortlist for Oxford Circus tonight. Any of the twenty eight on the who is free page can be asked for by name instead.
Note 02
The road west, and where it led
Oxford Street is far older than its shops. It follows the line of a Roman road that left London heading west, and for centuries it was simply the way out of town towards Uxbridge and, eventually, Oxford, which is how it came by its present name. Before that name settled, deeds and maps called it the Tyburn Road, after the stream and the village at its western end.
Tyburn was also where the gallows stood. For several hundred years condemned prisoners were carried along this line from Newgate to be hanged in front of large crowds, and the processions only stopped in 1783, when executions moved to Newgate itself. Nothing on the pavement at the Circus marks the route, but the crossing sits squarely on it.
Note 03
Nash's line between two worlds
The crossing only became a crossing in the 1810s, when John Nash drew a new ceremonial street for the Prince Regent. It was to run from Carlton House, the Regent's palace near St James's Park, north to Marylebone Park, the old royal hunting ground that Nash was turning into Regent's Park with terraces round its edge. Parliament passed the act in 1813, and where the new street cut across the old road west, Nash gave the junction rounded corners.
The route was not drawn straight for the sake of it. Nash steered it along the seam between the grand squares of Mayfair and the crowded, poorer streets of Soho, and he said openly that the street was meant to separate the one from the other. Step off Regent Street on either side of the Circus and the difference is still there in the width of the streets. Carlton House, the reason for the whole scheme, was pulled down in the 1820s, soon after the street was finished.
Note 04
Stucco out, stone in
Nash built in stucco, painted render over brick, and by the end of the nineteenth century his shopfronts were far too small for the trade that had grown up behind them. The Crown, which owned the land and still owns most of Regent Street, rebuilt almost the whole of it in stone during the 1910s and 1920s. The four quadrants at the Circus went up to one matching design and were finished in the late 1920s.
So what looks like a single Georgian set piece is really twentieth century work laid over a Regency plan. Almost nothing of Nash's own street survives at this end. The best survivor is north up the street at Langham Place, where All Souls, the church he designed with a ring of columns under a pointed spire, turns the bend so that the long view from the south ends on something worth looking at.
Note 05
Three railways under the pavement
The station came in 1900 with the Central London Railway, which charged the same twopence for any journey and was soon nicknamed the Twopenny Tube. The Bakerloo followed in 1906 with an entrance of its own, and that first Bakerloo building still stands on Argyll Street, faced in the dark red glazed tiles that marked the Tube stations of the decade.
The Victoria line arrived in 1969 and turned the Circus into one of the busiest interchanges on the network. None of it shows above ground except the stairways at the corners, which is rather the point: the Circus kept its shape while three generations of engineering went in underneath.
Note 06
Squares that were there first
Regent Street had to squeeze between estates that were already a century old. To the north-west, Cavendish Square was laid out from 1717 on land belonging to Edward Harley and named for his wife's family, and Harley Street, running north from it, carries his own name.
To the south-west, Hanover Square went up in the same years and took its name from the new royal house, George I having arrived from Hanover in 1714. Its parish church, St George's on St George Street, became the wedding church of fashionable London through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Both squares still keep their gardens, and both are worth the short detour from the crossing for anyone who wants to see what this corner of London looked like before Nash arrived.
Note 07
W1B on the board
None of the twenty eight on the board gives W1B as home. Their homes ring it all the same: three in Soho to the south-east, three in Mayfair to the south-west and two in Marylebone to the north-west, so escorts in Oxford Circus are never starting from the far side of London. Allow roughly an hour between the office saying yes and her knock, a little more while the evening rush clogs Regent Street; the chat shows her time once she sets off, and the rates list each length.
For the streets round the crossing, Great Portland Street runs north towards the park, Fitzrovia begins east of Regent Street, and Carnaby lies just to the south.
From The Roundup
Two notes worth reading for Oxford Circus
Asked most often
Oxford Circus, asked and answered
Why is a crossroads called a circus?
Is any of Nash's own Regent Street still standing?
Where can the old Tube building be seen?
Did the Tyburn processions really come this way?
One zone either way
Next along from Oxford Circus
Last strip
Say a name and an hour
Write in with a length, a time and the zone you are staying in, and a name from the board comes back with a window attached. That is the whole of the arrangement.